Thursday, May 29, 2008

Pound Cakes and Tickets

Today was a day of baking for me. I had some buttermilk in the fridge that I wanted to use before it went out of date, so I decided to make a buttermilk pound cake. This is the first time that I have made one of these from scratch, but from time to time I have a taste for foods that we ate back in Georgia. Brit Boy is a big fan of any kind of cake, so let’s just say that it won’t go to waste between the two of us. (laugh)

Pound cake is pretty popular back home. It gets its name from the original basic recipe that was made from a pound of flour, a pound of butter, eggs and sugar. However, some more up to date recipes like the one I did can be a bit lighter. The southern version that I did, calls for buttermilk. And buttermilk always seems to have this way of spiking up the flavor in cakes.

In writing this post about my pound cake, I had a thought. I wondered if pound cakes differed or were eaten around the world. So I did a bit of research. The pound cake that I made is basically a Southern US version of pound cake that is rich yellow cake. According to what I read in my research, a British pound cake is from the same origins which call for a pound of each ingredient and then dried fruit is added to this version. And there are many, many other varieties in other parts of the world. It is quite amazing and wonderful I think, that many of us share the same name for a cake, but our individual twists on the recipe in our regions of the world can make it uniquely ours.

So after reading this, I decided that I needed to tell a bit about how it is served where I come from. We usually serve our pound cake with no icing and just enjoy it like that. But you can also drizzle it with a glaze of your choosing or serve it with whipped cream and strawberries or whatever you have a hankering for. There are also chocolate and lemon pound cakes...it is kind of just whatever flavor you desire. One of the basic ways to bake pound cake is to bake it in a fluted pan, which makes a hole in the middle. Well I don’t have one of those pans, so I used a deep spring form pan and it turned out fine. It just made bigger pieces than is usually customary, but hey, that isn’t a bad thing sometimes. More to enjoy. (smile)

In other news, Brit Boy and I received something good in the mail yesterday. We got our Wimbledon tickets so we are all set. (smile) We found out that we had been chosen to receive tickets, months ago, but they don’t mail them out until close to the event. So now we just have a few short weeks to wait. We are so excited. I have watched it over the years on television as I grew up, so it is so great to now be able to go. Brit Boy and I are both thrilled.